Drug Metabolism and how it affects us

Ever wondered why some people can take a drug once and become addicted? Leading them hopelessly into further addiction and decline? hopefully this will help you to understand the reasons why and how this can happen. I will also do a breakdown of all the drugs currently floating around our universe and how they affect us and include them in seperate pages for you. For this section though, i will use their current street names… Please feel free to save or even print this info if you know someone who could benefit from this knowledge.

This will be explained in the most understanding terms here, just to give you an idea how the system of metabolism works, I will explain in further detail in another section if you are interested in knowing the finer details.

In the class of Opiates we have drugs such as Heroin, Morphine, Codeine, Oxycodone, etc, each of these is different in how it breaks down, and how long they take to break down once they are in your system.

To break down the drugs in ones system, imagine if you will the wonderful character that is Pacman, we have something similar known as our Enzyme-Cytochrome P450 (CYP). Once you have injected, snorted, smoked or even orally ingested, the drug enters your blood stream and your cells, starting the process of metabolising. Your body has a built in defence system to recognize the drug as a poison and wants to eliminate it fast, so it sends in our Pacmen, the Cytochrome P450s to break down the poison. This is where things get tricky for a first timers as this poison has not enetered before so there are not many P450s to get moving around the system, producing the longer effects of the drug (and also can lead to whats commonly known as "chasing the dragon" for the same high that was first produced). You see, once this poison has entered and is seen as a poison, more of these P450s are produced, bit like starting an army in a sense. The affect is accumalitive, the more you use the drug, the more of these enzymes are produced and are waiting for the drug. Once our little Pacmen break down the drug, it is further cleaned out through our liver, kidneys and passed out as urine and even in our stools.

So what happens next? the person has now become addicted/dependant to/on the drug, the high is getting less, so more of the drug is needed to produce the high… bit like trying to send more troops in, but our defences are always producing more troops to counteract, till you reach a point where the drug is only taken to feel "normal", and to stop going into a state of withdrawal, which leads us to the next stage, why do we go through withdrawal?

Once our body has become completely accumulated with the P450s, sitting in the wings waiting for the enemy poison, without the drug, they start to die, producing the well known affects of nausea, vomiting, diahorria, cramping, muscle cramping, muscle twitching, and the sweats, it can be very devastating to go through.

Now this not going into the purity, dosage and toxicity that is within these realms, but i will say this: Opiates are known as a Depressant, and that doesn’t mean you get "depressed" it actually means that it depresses the Central Nervous System, which can slow your breathing to an almost stop, and in some cases death.

Using any drug is putting your life in the hands of the person that made the drugs, you dont know where it came from, if they are clean, or even if they are made the same way everytime, the purity depends on the makers and all the midway points before it even reaches you, it could be cut several times and have anything added to it, including other cheaper made drugs thrown in to make the amount of drug go further… and ive only mentioned basic opiate metabolism here.